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Artful procrastination: Cory Arcangel and Jonah Peretti on a book of tweets about writing books

What do you do if you have a novel to write? Go to Twitter, and tweet about the work you're not doing, of course. Artist Cory Arcangel's new book is a compilation of those who couldn't resist tweeting the words "working on my novel".

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work combines film, music, video games, the internet and performance art. Originally a student of classical guitar, Arcangel moved into studying the technology of music, and his work since the turn of the millenium has sought inspiration from the machines that fill our lives.

He has hacked a Super Mario Bros. cartridge to remove all of the game’s graphics except for its fluffy white clouds; he’s produced a glockenspiel accompaniment for Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run; and very recently he helped recover lost works that Andy Warhol had produced using an Amiga 1000 in the mid-80s. He now has a book out, called Working On My Novel. It’s a compilation of tweets, found on twitter by searching for the phrase “working on my novel”, and retweeted by Arcangel’s account of the same name. From such a simple premise comes an amusing and sincere collection of procrastinations and distractions - especially familiar to those of us who know the power of Twitter all too well.

I spoke via Skype to both Arcangel and his friend Jonah Peretti, the founder of the viral website Buzzfeed - himself no stranger to the idea of compiling the tweets of strangers for comic effect. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity.

I’m told that you two are friends, which means I have to start this by asking Cory - why didn’t you publish this on Buzzfeed, as a listicle?Cory Arcangel: Oh, that is a great first question. Because, actually the first time that I published anything related to this idea… I mean, basically, when I thought of this idea I was working as a Buzzfeed editor, right Jonah?

Jonah Peretti: Yeah.

CA: And I, as one of my posts, I posted just a link which was to a URL which was a live search on Twitter for the phrase “working on my novel”. So actually it was published first on Buzzfeed. But this was very early Buzzfeed, so maybe - Jonah, correct me if I’m wrong - it was before Buzzfeed was the Buzzfeed as we know it.

JP: Yeah, it was a period of Buzzfeed where we were in a little office in Chinatown in New York, and we had maybe a dozen people, and it was really a lab. And the reason Cory was in the office was that I’d find interesting friends and say “hey, do you want to come one day a week and publish on Buzzfeed?” Cory was one of the friends who took me up on it.

CA: Yeah. And the thing I remember the most is you had some kind of coffee there. I hadn’t started drinking coffee yet, and you all had some kind of crazy... remember there was some thing about somebody getting a certain brand of coffee they’d bring? And I’d have two cups of it and I’d just, like, I was on the roof the whole time. And this idea came out of one of these coffee frenzies.

And why specifically “working on my novel”? Were you working, distracted, on a novel at the time?CA: Well…

Or it’s fun to laugh at people distract themselves on Twitter.CA: It was 2009, so it wasn’t brand new, but it was newish in culture. And I was just trying to wrap my head around it. And Jonah, am I right, that was still the era of the blog, I think?

JP: Yeah, blogging was still big. Facebook was still a simple social network, it didn’t have content on it, it was just a way to connect with your friends. Twitter was a lot smaller. In terms of watching Cory over the years, he often plays with things and gets an idea and then does something many years later with the idea. If the idea sticks with him for five years then it’s probably a good idea, and he should do something. I think this is another example of that with this book, which wasn’t like he thought of it and did it the next week and, “oh, this is an easy idea, I’ll just round up a bunch of tweets and have a book”. This is something he’d been thinking of for many years.

CA: Yeah, five years, from beginning to end. It went from, as Jonah was saying, all of a sudden we had micro. People were tweeting sentences, and that was a new thing, and I was trying to figure out what... I mean, it’s hard to remember, it’s hard to think about now, but what does it mean that it’s new, and that, of course, it seems perfectly obvious to contrast it to the novel. That was the first thing that came to my head.

It seems like a funny rejoinder to the discussion about the idea of using things like Twitter for 21st-century fiction. The novelist David Mitchell, for instance, is tweeting out, bit by bit, bits of his new new novel.CA: I don’t know if it’s a response to that, but I definitely think of it as a novel. A novel novel. And it’s fiction - we decided it was fiction - because we had a long conversation and we purposely made it in the Penguin default novel template. So it really feels like a novel, smells like a novel. But, you know, I do really think of it as a real book.

When you had that long conversation about why it’s a novel, do you think it has a narrative for instance?CA: The long conversation at Penguin was whether it was fiction or non-fiction. We could have gone either way, but fiction to me seemed more poetic. But yeah, there is a narrative, and if you have the book there are these tea kettle drawings [that] serve as the chapter markers between different sections. So there’s a kind of "chill" section, there’s a culture section where people are talking about the kind of culture that they surround themselves with while writing the novel, there’s a kind of punchline section, that just says “working on my novel” page after page. There is a desperation section, where people are getting really stressed out, and then there’s the triumph section, where the books ends up. The book kind of ends on a high note, a kind of creative triumph.

JP: What I would say is that the book itself is a triumph. A literary triumph.

CA: [laughs]

JP: Another thing I find so interesting is that so many of the interesting things that have come out of the web have come out of procrastination. I think it’s probably true in art as well, but my whole career is based on procrastination - writing my master’s thesis and discovering, accidentally, the viral web, and I think the relationship between procrastination and doing meaningful work is pretty interesting right now, and it’s sometimes the things that people dismiss the most that are the most valuable generative activities.

CA: Yeah, it’s funny Jonah you say that, you know, there’s a really great artist in New York named David Hammons, and he has this great line where - I can’t remember it exactly - but it’s something like he makes his best stuff while he’s on his way from one end of the studio, like… I’m ruining this story, but the idea is that he’s in his studio going from point A to point B, to complete a task, it’s what he does on the way, by wasting time, is where all his good ideas come from. So I think there’s something about procrastination, or when you turn off your mind, it’s kind of like when you relax.

There are a lot of great artists who talk about walking being conducive to creativity, and I guess that’s a kind of procrastination as well. And this is just going for a walk along the internet, in a way.CA: Yeah, forced procrastination.

JP: It also reminds me of your line of surfwear, which is - I don’t know if you know about this project - but it’s clothes and apparel for when you’re lying in bed surfing the internet. Which is, essentially, lifestyle products created by Cory to improve the art of procrastination.

CA: [laughs] Yeah, to make it more comfortable.

A promotional shot of models in Arcangel Surfware clothing on a bed with Arcangel Surfware sheets. Photo: Cory Arcangel

I think I’ve seen these. These are the Photoshop colour swatches.CA: Yeah, the Arcangel surfwear, yeah.

I saw, and briefly coveted, the duvet cover.CA: Yeah, that was the piece de resistance, the bedsheets, which actually was a lot harder than I ever imagined.

Really? I’m interested to hear how hard it is to create a duvet cover.CA: Well there aren’t so many factories that make that kind of thing. Most of them are in China, and while some are made in the United States, there’s not, like, a factory in New York that makes them. And there isn’t like a Zazzle [a site where users can upload images to be printed on t-shirts] for them or whatever, you know.

So in the course of trying of trying to create a line of products that celebrate procrastination, you actually had to do a lot of work.CA: That’s the thing actually, and I’m sure Jonah knows about this, for this book I had to write a spider that actually recorded Twitter, the “working on my novel” mentions for two years, because Twitter doesn’t - or at least at the time - didn’t have an archive. And then I had to write a content management system to administer the permissions, and keep track of whether people wanted to be in the novel or not, so actually the book took quite a bit of work, and it actually took quite a bit of software. And staring at Excel spreadsheets. It’s often things that look easy sometimes aren’t so easy, but often some things that are easy are also very easy.

And also, a compilation of things like this is also resulting in a book tour, for instance, so from a very simple procrastination idea you’ve created a lot of work for yourself.CA: Yeah, that’s the story of my life.

In the news recently there were these recovered Andy Warhol artworks, which were produced on an Amiga 1000 PC in the mid-80s. I found this a really interesting story, of recovering works on a dead format and bringing them to life again. I was wondering if you’d mind talking about that for a bit.CA: That was another long-term project that I’d done over the last couple of years. That was in collaboration with several organisations - one was the Carnegie Museum, one was the Carnegie Studio for Creative Inquiry, and also the Andy Warhol Museum, and also the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club, so a lot of people were involved, and I was just kind of the email writer, basically. And making sure I cc’d everbody. And the short story is, yeah, Andy Warhol had an Amiga. The Warhol Museum had his archive of all his Amiga disks, and his computers, because Andy Warhol was a totally crazy horder.

I can believe that.CA:I don’t know if you know, but he never threw anything out his whole life, basically. So the Warhol Museum has his archive, but it’s like half a million objects or something. They’re still going through it, and thus they had never done his disks, you know, they had never looked at them. So I kind of arranged with this great computer hacking club at Carnege Mellon called the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club to look at his disks and see if there’s anything on them, and it turns out yeah, there’s a bunch of drawings by him.

JP: And the other thing I think is amazing is that it turned out those were the greatest works Andy Warhol ever did.

CA: [laughs] I wouldn’t say they’re the greatest, but they’re masterpieces, do you know what I mean? Especially this one he did of Marilyn Monroe, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, he scribbles all around it. They’re really amazing, they’re much better than my computer stuff.

I saw that fascinating video that was discovered of him doing it on TV, in the 80s, and he was drawing Debbie Harry live on TV. That was a really interesting relic, I guess.CA: Yeah, that’s why he had an Amiga, because Amiga hired him to be the spokesman for the launch. And they basically shoved the Amiga onto him with an engineer and sat him down for, I think, a couple of months preceding that launch, and taught him how to draw. And that resulted in the video, and we think - but nobody really knows - the files were basically him practicing for the launch. It’s super fascinating, and it was a really amazing project, especially with this computer club. I don’t know if you have a chance to look into their work, but it’s really brilliant.

And those artworks are now going on tour?CA: Not that I know of. In terms of my involvement in the project, the end state was they were published. They don’t actually exist, they’re just digital files. So I don’t know how they would go on tour, though I’m sure somebody could figure it out. I mean, in a way, when they were published online they went on tour around the world in five seconds.

Exactly.CA: In fact, Jonah, you know what I did the other day? I was looking for the original Buzzfeed post of Working On My Novel, and I found it on archive.org.

JP: Really?

CA: Yeah, I’ll send it to both of you. It’s kind of amazing, on archive.org the whole website loads as it did, the post looks exactly like it did in 2009.

CA: I think they definitely don’t capture everything, so I was really surprised that somehow they got it. I think as sites get more dynamic, it gets harder to capture stuff.

It does, especially social media and forums and so on where it’s kind of impossible to grasp the flow of conversation in those mediums.CA: Yeah, totally.

Going back to the idea of Working On My Novel having a narrative, it’s just occurred to me, do you consider Buzzfeed to have a narrative, and be a work of fiction, as a whole?CA: Oh I love it Jonah, go for it.

JP: Well, Buzzfeed is more things than people realise. We do news content, which is definitely not fiction. We have two reporters in the Ukraine right now, we did our first reporting from inside Baghdad recently, we have an investigative journalism team that’s covering all kinds of things, a breaking news team, so a whole bunch of news which is relatively new to us as a company. We weren’t doing that when Cory was hanging out with us in those early day. And then we’re an entertainment company that makes lists and quizzes, and that, I think, is fiction in the broadest sense, of fun, entertaining content, and there’s a lot of storytelling to it. And then we also do a lot of life content, or lifestyle content, things like DIY and food and things that are focussed on improving peoples’ lives, which is more service oriented content. So I’d say those are the three broad categories. And then our video operation in Los Angeles - we’re on a three acre studio lot, we’ve been building that out, and we’re doing a lot of work on the future of fiction and where will storytelling go, and that’s led by Ze Frank, who’s another very interesting guy who was doing a lot of great early stuff on the internet.

I remember loving a lot of his work. But this makes me wonder, Cory, does this mean that you could print off the fiction bit of Buzzfeed and remix that, or repurpose that?
CA: Oh you know, it’s so funny, it was so much work to do the book, I can’t even… [laughs]

A lot of work to document this procrastination.CA: I’m sure in a couple of years, after the dust clears. But right now I can go in the other direction, the thing that’s fun about a book is it’s really locked down. And I live, and I’m sure Jonah also, you know, you really live in this digital world which is basically a temporary performance. Everything is so ephemeral. It’s so fun to lock something down onto a piece of paper, because it’s so different from what I’m used to have been doing for the last 20 years.

Like archive.org actually, I realise. It’s like your own personal archive.org.CA: As a piece of archival technology, a book is really unbeatable.

The battery never dies.CA: Yeah, yeah, totally.

JP: Gotta be careful of fires.

CA: Yeah, was just going to say. Like the Alexandria Library or something, the one Achilles heel of a book, it’s fire.

So let’s hope there are no fires. Or EMPs either, because the entire ephemerality of the internet will disappear as well.C: What is EMP?

Electro-magnetic pulse.C: Is that a real thing?

It is. It’s a side effect of nuclear explosions, which is obviously a cheery topic. But yeah, you’ll be laughing when you have a book and everyone’s complaining that their tablets are dead.C: Actually, the book is available on Kindle, which I have to take a look at. That sounds cool to me.

J: It’ll be great in the post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic world that we’ll be able to read about people procrastinating on their novels. Civilisation has survived!

This piece forms part of our Social Media Week. Click here to read the introduction, and here to see the other pieces in the series.

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Now listen to an edited extract of Ian, Cory and Jonah's conversation on the NS podcast:

Commons Confidential: Money for old Gove

Treachery is proving profitable for Michael Gove since his backstabbing of Boris Johnson led to the victim being named Foreign Sec and the knifeman carved out of Theresa May’s cabinet. The former injustice secretary was overheard giving it the big “I am” in the Lords café bar by my snout and boasting that he’ll trouser £300,000 on the political sidelines. I note a £150,000 Times column and £17,500 HarperCollins book deal have been duly registered. Speaking engagements, he confided to the Tory peer Simone Finn, will be equally lucrative.

Gove is polite (always says hello and smiles at me despite what I write) but it was insensitive to talk money when his companion was moaning. Finn, a Cameron crony, whined that she had been sacked as a spad and so is out of pocket. Perhaps he could lend her a tenner. And I do hope Mickey isn’t passing himself off as an “expert” to coin it.

While Nigel Farage’s successor-but-one Paul “Dr Nutty” Nuttall protests that he never doctored a CV with an invented university PhD, Ukip’s ritzy nonpareil continues to enjoy the high life. My informant spied Farage, the self-appointed people’s chief revolter, relaxing in first class on a British Airways flight from New York to Blighty. Drinking three types of champagne doesn’t come cheap at £8,000 one-way, so either the Brexit elitist is earning big bucks or he has found a sugar daddy. Nowt’s too good for the Quitters, eh?

Labour’s youngest MP, Lou Haigh, was popular in a Justice for Colombia delegation to monitor the Northern Ireland-inspired peace process there. At Normandia prison in Chiquinquira, after a five-hour drive to see Farc guerrillas cleared for release, inmates pushed past the British male trade unionists to greet the 29-year-old Sheffield Heeley tribune. What a change from parliament, where it is women who are treated as if they’re wearing Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks.

The kowtowing is catching up with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, the SNP party animal and onetime-Tory-turned-Labour. Better late than never, I hear, she delivered a masterclass in toadying to the Chinese at a Ditchley Park conflab. Ahmed-Grovel MP avoided discussion of human rights abuses and made much instead of the joys of Scotch whisky to Beijing, and Scotland as a gateway to the UK. I trust she kept her sycophancy secret from SNP colleagues jostling in parliament a short while back for photographs with Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

John Bercow is concerned that private schools dominate visits to parliament. So a bit like the Commons chamber, where 32 per cent of MPs (48 per cent of Tories) come from establishments that teach 7 per cent of pupils in the UK.

Kevin Maguire is Associate Editor (Politics) on the Daily Mirror and author of our Commons Confidential column on the high politics and low life in Westminster. An award-winning journalist, he is in frequent demand on television and radio and co-authored a book on great parliamentary scandals. He was formerly Chief Reporter on the Guardian and Labour Correspondent on the Daily Telegraph.